Giancarlo Lauto

How preference markets assist new product idea screening

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the different heuristics adopted by a crowd and a management committee to evaluate new product proposals, and whether, in assessing the value of proposals, they emphasize different features. Design/methodology/approach – The study takes a quantitative analysis approach to study an internal innovation contest held by the biotechnology company Novozymes. The contest generated 201 proposals that were evaluated by 109 research and development professionals by means of a virtual preference market, and by a management committee. Findings – The crowd and the committees’ assessments of the value of the proposals were based on different features. The committee emphasized experience and inventors’ seniority; the crowd set more store on informative idea descriptions but penalized overly complex and lengthy proposals. Research limitations/implications – The design of the innovation contest does not allow full comparison of the preference functions of crowd and committ...

Fly Away From the Nest? A Configurational Analysis of Family Embeddedness and Individual Attributes in the Entrepreneurial Entry Decision by Next-Generation Members:

This study aims to determine how family embeddedness conditions combine with the goals and attributes of individuals with a family business background to engender to two patterns of entrepreneurship: succession in the family business and foundation of a new venture. Our empirical study is conducted using 169 cases of entrepreneurs operating in Italy. Inductively building on the configurations derived from the analysis, we suggest a series of theoretical propositions focusing on family embeddedness, individual attributes, and entrepreneurial paths of next-generation family business members.

THE EFFECT OF PATH-DEPENDENCE AND UNCERTAINTY ON THE VALUE OF MATURE TECHNOLOGIES

This paper examines whether technological advances benefit more from path-dependent or path-creating capabilities. Consistently with recent advances in the literature, we argue that multiple technological trajectories can coexist in a field; therefore, firms may contribute to technological development by recombining in novel ways the capabilities that are widespread in the field, or by building novel and rare capabilities. The paper also conceptualises how technological uncertainty affects the value of such capabilities. Using patent data from 1977 to 2007 for firms developing the hydrocracking technology, the paper finds that both rare and widespread capabilities are valuable to the invention process, thereby suggesting that both path-dependent and path-creating strategies are beneficial for technological development. The paper shows that uncertainty has an inverted U-shaped effect on invention value. In particular, under conditions of low uncertainty, path-dependent capabilities tend to be more valuable.

Satisfaction of entrepreneurs: a comparison between funders and successors

A growing amount of research compares the job satisfaction of employees to self-employed. However, very few studies focus on the difference within entrepreneurs. Given the potential importance of e...